The activities and influence of Europeans varied in different parts of the world. In India and China, centers of high civilizations, Europeans remained on the periphery in trading stations for centuries. In Africa, they also established themselves on the coasts, trading with the indigenous populations of the interior. In the Americas, they created colonies and imposed their religious, social, and political institutions on the native peoples. Europeans also brought new diseases to the Americas, which hastened the collapse of the indigenous cultures on the two continents. However, cross-cultural influence flowed in both directions. The encounters with non-European peoples profoundly affected European trade, social life, and ideas.With their American colonies and the global reach of their seafarers, Europeans helped to create a truly global trading system, introducing new foods (such as tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and corn) that changed the food cultures of China, India, and Europe. At the same time as Europe was experiencing the material consequences of its interaction with the world, European intellectuals began to describe and analyze the peoples and cultures with which they came into contact, as well as to collect and catalogue the flora and fauna they discovered. The use of “race” as a primary category for differentiating peoples coincided with the expansion of slavery, as Europeans sought a work force for overseas plantations; this categorization helped Europeans justify the slave system. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, the transatlantic slave trade became a central feature of the world economy, and millions of Africans were transported via the notorious “Middle Passage” to labor on plantations in the Americas. The vast and cruel slave system began to generate opposition in Europe beginning in the late 18th century. Abolitionists objected to the system on humanitarian and religious grounds. An important strand of Enlightenment thought — the belief in citizenship, popular sovereignty, equality, and liberty — promoted by the American and French Revolutions also contributed to the ideology of the abolitionist movements, and European states abolished the slave trade in the early 19th century. From the late 18th century to the era of decolonization, these Enlightenment principles influenced those who opposed Europe’s global domination.

Yet, this critique of colonialism did not have an immediate effect, given that the 19th century proved to be a period of empire building. Driven by the needs of an industrial economy and nationalism, Europeans expanded their territorial control in Asia and Africa through warfare, the seizure of property, and, in some cases, immigration. In the late 19th century, the scale and pace of conquest intensified because of asymmetries in military technology, communications, and national rivalries among the Great Powers. In conquered territories, Europeans established new administrative, legal, and cultural institutions, and restructured colonial economies to meet European needs. These actions often led to resistance in colonial areas. Within Europe, exposure to new peoples and cultures influenced art and literature, and spurred on efforts to find a scientific basis for “racial” difference. Competition for colonies also destabilized the European balance of power and was a significant cause of World War I. In the mid–20th century, the rise of the United States as an economic and military power, two world wars, and the four-decades-long Cold War led to a decolonization movement that diminished Europe’s economic and diplomatic place in the world. At the end of the 20th century, Europe sought new ways of defining interactions among its own nations and with the rest of the world. At the same time, the migration of non-European people into Europe began to change the ethnic and religious composition of European society and to create uncertainties about European identity.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THEME 2: ECONOMIC AND COMMERCIAL DEVELOPMENTS (ECD)

Overarching Questions:

• How has capitalism developed as an economic system?
• How has the organization of society changed as a result of or in response to the development and spread of capitalism?
• What were the causes and consequences of economic and social inequality?
• How did individuals, groups, and the state respond to economic and social inequality?

In the centuries after 1450, Europe first entered and then gradually came to dominate a global commercial network. Building off the voyages of exploration and colonization, the Commercial Revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries involved a wide range of new financial and economic practices — such as joint-stock companies, widely capitalized banks, and triangular trade — all of which supported an emerging money economy. New commercial techniques and goods provided Europeans with an improved diet and standard of living. Wealth from commerce supported, in turn, the growth of industrial capitalism in subsequent centuries.

Commercial wealth helped transform a preindustrial economy based on guild production, cottage industry, and subsistence agriculture into one driven by market operations. While market mechanisms generated wealth and social position for some, they also destabilized traditional patterns of economic activity, such as when the wages of urban artisans and workers declined in the 16th century because of the Price Revolution. Still, commercial wealth generated resources for centralizing states, many of which, prior to the French Revolution, justified government management of trade, manufacturing, finance, and taxation through the theory of mercantilism. Mercantilism assumed that existing sources of wealth could not be expanded; accordingly, the only way to increase one’s economic power over others was to gain a greater share of the existing sources of wealth. As a result, mercantilism promoted commercial competition and warfare overseas.

Market demands generated the increasingly mechanized production of goods through the technology of the Industrial Revolution. Large-scale production required capital investment, which led to the development of capitalism, justified by Adam Smith through the concept of the “invisible hand of the marketplace.” The growth of large-scale agriculture and factories changed social and economic relations. Peasants left the countryside to work in the new factories, giving up lives as tenants on landlords’ estates for wage labor. Improved climate and diet supported a gradual population increase in the 18th century, and then came a seeming breakthrough of the Malthusian trap (the belief that population could not expand beyond the level of subsistence) with a population explosion in the industrial 19th century. Industrialization generated unprecedented levels of material prosperity for some Europeans, particularly during the Second Industrial Revolution (1850–1914), when an outburst of new technologies ushered Europe into modern mass society.

Prosperity was never equally distributed, either geographically or by social class, and despite the wonders of the railroad and airplane, poverty never disappeared. Capitalism produced its own forms of poverty and social subjection. It created financial markets that periodically crashed, putting people dependent on wages out of work and wiping out investors’ capital. Its trading system shifted production from expensive to inexpensive regions, reducing or holding down the wages of workers. By the 19th century, conditions of economic inequality and the resultant social and political instability across Europe raised questions about the role evolving nation-states could or should play in the economic lives of their subjects and citizens. Socialism argued for state ownership of property and economic planning to promote equality, and, later, Marxism developed a systematic economic and historical theory that inspired working-class movements and revolutions to overthrow the capitalist system.

The devastating impact of two world wars and the Great Depression transformed pre-1914 economic patterns and complicated the task of governments in managing the unstable economic situation. Soviet Russia and its post–World War II satellites represented one path, while nations in western and central Europe modified laissez-faire capitalism with Keynesian budget and tax policies and an expanding welfare state. Consumerism, always an important factor in economic growth, took on even more importance in the second half of the 20th century, although not without criticism. Perhaps the most significant change since World War II has been the movement toward European economic unity and a common currency. Though policies of unity have supported Europe’s postwar economic miracle, they have also encountered challenges of a stagnating population, financial crises, and growing social welfare commitments.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Science came to be viewed as an objective source of truth about the natural world.  Artists, musicians, and writers also employed empirical and quantitative methods to abstract the notions of space, time, and sound in new cultural movements, many of which continued to draw on classical subjects and motifs, such as the Renaissance.During the Enlightenment, educated Europeans came to accept the world as governed by natural laws, accessible through systematic observation and articulated in mathematics. The results of this intellectual movement were impressive, producing a new understanding of the universe (often designated as Newtonian mechanics) and systems to organize and advance the growing body of knowledge of plants, animals, and minerals. Under the influence of the French and Industrial Revolutions, intellectuals and activists attempted to employ a similarly “scientific” approach to the questions of political, social, and economic reform, resulting in the development of such ideologies as conservatism, liberalism, nationalism, socialism, and Marxism.

Those in the fine arts and literature both applied and commented on these methods in their depictions of European life during this period of rapid change.Over time, the new method for acquiring knowledge through observation and experiment raised questions about the relationship between the observer and the observed. Beginning in the 19th century, new theories called into question the supremacy of reason and the possibility of finding objective truth in favor of subjective interpretations of reality and the importance of non-rational forces. In physics, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of relativity, which took the observer into account, challenged Newtonian mechanics, and, in psychology, Freud emphasized the importance of irrational drives in human behavior.

Beginning in the 19th century and accelerating in the 20th, European artists and intellectuals, along with a portion of the educated public, rejected absolute paradigms (whether idealist or scientific), replacing them with relative and subjective ones, as exemplified by existential philosophy, modern art, and postmodernist ideas and culture. The emergence of these ideas created a conflict between science and subjective approaches to knowledge. Europeans continued to engage in science and to regard the results of science as being of universal value, while postmodernist thinkers emphasized the subjective component — the role of the actor — in all human activities, including scientific ones.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THEME 4: States and Other Institutions of Power (SOP)


Overarching Questions:

What forms have European governments taken, and how have these changed over time?

In what ways and why have European governments moved toward or reacted against representative and democratic principles and practices?

How did civil institutions develop apart from governments, and what impact have they had upon European states?

How and why did changes in warfare affect diplomacy, the European state system, and the balance of power?* How did the concept of a balance of power emerge, develop, and eventually become institutionalized?

After 1450, the old ideal that Europe constituted a unified Christendom was weakened by the rise of sovereign states. These states asserted a monopoly over law and the management of all institutions, including the church. The growth of secular power played a critical role in the success of the Protestant Reformation, and states gained increasing influence over religious affairs. The military revolution of the early modern period forced states to find new and better sources of revenue, and it spurred the expansion of state control over political and economic functions. In the long view, war became increasingly costly, technologically sophisticated, and deadly. As Europeans expanded overseas, the theaters of European warfare expanded as well.


European polities took a variety of forms — empires, nation-states, and small republics. Absolute monarchies concentrated all authority in a single person who was regarded as divinely ordained, whereas in constitutional governments power was shared between the monarch and representative institutions. Early modern advances in education, publishing, and prosperity created “public opinion” and “civil society” independent of government, developments that supported and were promoted by Enlightenment theories of natural rights and the social contract. Political revolutions and industrialization shifted governance from monarchies and aristocracies to parliamentary institutions that both generated and embodied the rule of law while gradually widening the participation of citizens in governance through the extension of suffrage. In the late 19th century, as European states became increasingly responsive to public opinion and developed mass political parties, they ironically became impersonal and bureaucratic. After World War I, under the pressure of political and economic crises, totalitarian regimes threatened parliamentary governments.

The European state system, originating in the Peace of Westphalia and structuring interstate relations through World War I, assumed that the continent would be divided into independent sovereign states and that war and diplomacy would be the normal means of interstate relations. In the 19th century, the goal of establishing and maintaining a balance of power was challenged by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the emergence of Italy and Germany as states, the weakening of traditional empires, and shifts in the alliance system. New and hardened alliances between countries driven by overseas competition and the growing influence of nationalism undermined diplomatic efforts to stave off war in the first half of the 20th century. In the 20th century, new international organizations (the League of Nations, the United Nations, NGOs) attempted to develop international law and modes of dispute resolution that would promote peace. After the catastrophe of two world wars, European states returned to the goal of a unified Europe, embodied this time not in Christendom but in the secular institutions of the European Union.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

THEME 5: SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT (SCD)